Irregular Warfare Podcast - How a Group of Women Brought the Fight to the Islamic State

Episode Date: June 4, 2021

How did the United States leverage local partners in the fight against the Islamic State? What were the unique dynamics of partnering with the Kurdish People’s Protection Units, particularly the Women’s Protection Units? What can this case teach us about warfare, will, and relationships? Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, author of the New York Times best-selling book The Daughters of Kobani, and retired General Joseph Votel, former commander of US Central Command, join this episode to discuss these questions and more.

This was a fighting force few people knew in a town few people had heard of that was leading a fight that few people wanted to lead. And I think from a human standpoint and from a wartime history standpoint of, you know, we talk about war as if it's not personal, and it quite deeply is for those who live it. And I see it from the ground of those who were looking for international partners for support. The Syrian Kurds had an existing command and control structure. They had operating methods. They had values. They had principles that went along with all of that. And we were able to fall in on that. We did not try to recreate them in our own image, but we took the Kurds as they were.

Welcome to Episode 28 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. I'm Shawna Sennett, and I will be your host today, along with our newest team member, Laura Jones. Today's episode considers the unique dynamic of selecting and working with partner forces in the fight against the Islamic State, with a particular focus on the Kurdish Women's Protection Units in Syria. We start today's episode with a discussion of the evolution of the ISIS threat and the political atmosphere surrounding U.S. intervention. Our guests go on to use the case of the Kurdish YPJ and the part they played in the Syrian Democratic Forces to illustrate the characteristics of the Kurdish YPJ and the part they played in the Syrian Democratic Forces to illustrate the characteristics of an effective partner force, as well as the follow-on effects that this all-female force had in achieving both local and U.S. strategic objectives against ISIS.

They conclude by addressing the lessons that the case illuminates about the politics and purposes of intervention against contemporary transnational threats. Gail Zamak-Lamon is the award-winning author of several New York Times bestsellers, to include The Daughters of Kobani, on which this discussion is based. She is an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a frequent speaker, author, and contributor to discussion forums, media outlets, and national security organizations on policy related to security, women, and technology. General Joseph Vettel served for 39 years in the United States Army, last serving as commander of U.S. Central Command. He preceded that assignment with service as commander of U.S. Special Operations Command and Joint Special Operations Command.

General Vettel is currently president and CEO of Business Executives for National Security and is on the executive board of the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. You are listening to the Irregular Warfare podcast, a joint production of the Princeton Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. Here is our conversation with Gail and Joe. Gail, Joe, it's great to have you here. We really appreciate you coming on the Irregular Warfare podcast today.

It's great to be with you, Shauna and Laura, and especially with Gail. Yes, I'm glad to join you. It's a conversation I've been looking forward to. So we'd like to set the scene a little bit about why we're talking about this. So if we're thinking about why and how the U.S. got involved in the counter-ISIS fight in this 2014 to 2017 period, what was important about ISIS and what was distinct about how they approached their objectives in the region, but particularly in Syria. And I'll direct that to you, Joe, first. Okay, thanks. Yeah. So, you know, we watched this develop over a period of time, you know,

when we left Iraq in 2011, we were certainly paying very, very close attention to what was happening in the area. And we saw this organization rise, initially kind of Al-Qaeda and Iraq-like, but it just seemed much more aggressive. And I think what really stands out as you watch the development of this organization, where we arrived eventually in 2014, was that they had popular appeal, certainly with a lot of the disenfranchised persons in Syria and Iraq. And of course, they had a real popular appeal with people globally, and they were able to draw foreign fighters from over 100 countries in fairly large, large numbers. So, you know, that's the first thing that stands up. The second thing is that is their very aggressive use of

social media and the internet for recruiting and facilitating fighters into the area. That was new. And frankly, why we think of ourselves as a, from the military standpoint, as a modern force, we were ill prepared to deal with this at that particular time. So they had a definite asymmetric advantage. They also had these state-like ambitions where it was more than just a terrorist group. They actually were trying to govern and control terrain and control populations and start to set up the instruments of what most of us would think of as governance. And then I think the final thing that stood out the most to me about ISIS was their sense of urgency. Originally, we thought of them as kind of a new form of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, And, you know, originally we thought of them as kind of a new form of al-Qaeda in Iraq, al-Qaeda in Iraq 2.0.

But what set them apart from al-Qaeda was their urgency in establishing the caliphate. That was a big piece for them. That differed from kind of the ideology of al-Qaeda, which was really the long war, the long fight here. Great. And, Gail, you've covered a lot of conflicts throughout your career. As you were specifically doing the research for this conflict, what struck you about that, about the way ISIS approached this? I had begun really tracking Syria policy early on. And what struck me was the evolution of the entire war from a peaceful protest to the time has come for Assad to step aside to watching it morph into really a flame that attracted extremists from across the region. And the thing that kept standing out to me when I would talk to people who were close to it was that ISIS was a symptom

of the broader civil war. And it wasn't that people weren't paying attention. It was, I think truly, that the ghost of the Iraq war hung over every policy decision made on Syria. And there was no sense from the policy realm that there was appetite or interest in putting U.S. ground forces at risk in Syria. And so here comes ISIS to say, we're going to test that. We're going to test that with spectacle and with inhumanity and with barbarity at a scale and speed that will shock you, world. And I think that was why 2014 was such a pivotal year. Thanks, Gail. That's a great lead into our next question. I'd like to get into the domestic and international security considerations underlying the situation in Syria and explore that. How did ISIS seek to exploit the perception of Western hesitancy? And how did that affect US decision making? You live this from vantage points that I think you wake up with it and you go to sleep with it and you're talking to people. You know, I remember talking to young people who had been part of it, of protesting Assad and just talking to them about how they never thought that this is where this would end up.

And ISIS changed, I think, the calculation for the United States because they made it impossible to look away, truly, from a public imagination. The tragedy of James Foley, the tragedy of Sinjar, and everything that happened with U.S. hostages, ISIS really presented this challenge that could not go unanswered. Just to echo some of what Gail is saying here, I think it's important to appreciate the broader context of U.S. national security discussions at the time. Remember, this is post bin Laden. So we've achieved a major objective here. And, you know, and many looked at this as an opportunity to, you know, to maybe shift away from this. We were ramping up our engagement and our

discussions with Iran that would ultimately lead towards this. Frankly, this was a very heavy priority. And then, of course, by this time, the Obama administration had certainly given indications that we were trying to shift to the Pacific. For all the reasons that we fully appreciate today, we were thinking about that back then. So there really wasn't a great appetite to get back involved into the Middle East. But as Gail highlighted, some of these events, you just could not ignore. I mean, she's talked very passionately about Mr. Foley. But of course, everybody can remember the heartbreaking images of refugees fleeing

Syria and what that meant. And so you began to see the destabilizing impact that this conflict was having. And then, of course, you know, the realization that what ISIS was doing was trying to create a kind of an extreme Islamic state right smack in the middle of the Levant, I think really, really forced us to take this seriously. On the displacement piece, it was crushing. I mean, one in four people at one point in Lebanon were Syrian refugees. And the heartbreak just continued to the point that the UN, I really think at that point, UNHCR, the High Commission for Refugees, actually ran out of adjectives to describe the horror of Syria. No one had words left, and no one in the world had space left. Well, Gail, what you're describing right now shows just how personal this problem was.

And so to take it from this macro policy level down to the situation in Syria on the ground, who are the different actors who had a stake here? Joe, I know you had a lot of exposure to this. Well, sure. You know, again, part of the challenge with this, of course, is that there is the ISIS threat and there is also the internal civil threat that is playing out at the same time in Syria. And I think one of the challenges that we had was sorting out with people on the ground, which was the priority, which was worse. You know, frankly, from our perspective, for all the reasons that we've just talked about, I think we all viewed ISIS as being the worst thing, but that was not necessarily shared by all the people on the ground.

So when you looked at people like the Free Syrian Army and all the militias that were involved with that, that was certainly an angle that we looked at. And in certain parts of our government had already reached out and had established relationships with some of them, ostensibly to weaken the Assad regime's part, and then perhaps to assist with ISIS. Iran, I think, is an actor in this, certainly. This so-called Shia crescent that reaches from Beirut to Baghdad to Tehran that supports a lot of their influence activities and kind of helps them pursue their objective of, you know, looking out for the Shia populations was important and I think made them an actor in this. And of course, as we're going to get into here, the Kurds are a key part of this as well. Joe, to continue with that thought, can you touch on the intricacies of selecting a regional partner

for the ISIS fight and how partner motivations played a key role? I think, you know, as we looked at the partner considerations in this, one of the big factors was this idea of Assad versus ISIS. And this, I think, dominated a lot of discussion. There certainly was a lot of political discussion in our country about the need to address the Assad regime. At the same time, the administration was getting more and more focused on ISIS. And I think this made the selection of partners very, very difficult. As you will all remember, of partners very, very difficult. As you will all remember, we had a kind of an abortive effort to try to identify Arab militias that could help us in the fight against ISIS. And we spent a lot of time, a lot of money doing this. And it was ultimately, it was a breathtaking failure,

frankly, and for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was that they had really no interest in prioritizing ISIS. They were really focused on Assad. But to me, it was very, very difficult to sort out who was who, who was focused on what, and who could be a reliable partner for us. Gail, how did we get here? You spent a lot of time with the Syrian Kurds and the YPJ especially. How did they end up as U.S. partners? There are two parallel scenes and worlds playing out.

On the one side is the American policy machinery looking for a partner that would bring the fight to ISIS without toppling Assad. There was deep frustration inside the State Department from those who said, listen, the regime should be our priority. ISIS is a symptom, not the cause. And yet inside the Obama administration, they were really deeply focused on how do you deal with these threats, but also not have your administration consumed by them and put US forces at risk. And then you have in parallel view, those on the ground who are fighting the predecessors to the Islamic State, the groups that existed before there was an Islamic State, Nusra and others, right, that are fighting in Syria. So there was

no official caliphate declared, but there were battles that were going on. And people who had in early in this Syrian civil war decided that this would be the moment in which self-rule would become a reality. They would look at the opening created by the Syrian civil war as a moment in which organization and mobilization would come together to pursue political ends of self-rule. Well, there's a complex history here as well, right? When we consider how Kurdish resistance has manifested throughout this conflict, how did the People's Protection Units and the YPJ assume such a prominent role in this case? Quite honestly, there were lots of scholars outside who were deeply surprised that it was

this group of Syrian Kurds who ended up, you know, really being the ones to be in charge at checkpoints to take security. But you couldn't understand 2011 without understanding 2004 and what had happened in commercially in 2004. And Syrian Kurds who had watched as people faced armed government-backed forces and had no recourse, right? And so there were young people who watched that happen to the Kurdish community and who said, we don't want that to happen again. If there is another instance, we will be ready and we will be mobilized.

And so by 2011 and the Syrian civil wars beginning, there is a group of Syrian Kurds that had decided to form people's protection units in 2011 and 2012. And they start, even people who didn't particularly like them politically, right? Because they were following one of the political lanes of Kurdish thought. It wasn't the only political lane of Kurdish thought, but there were lots of people on the ground who said, if you keep those folks out, then that's fine. And so that becomes the backdrop that 2011, 2012, 2013 skirmishes are happening, but then the skirmishes become more and more intense as the extremist groups that they're fighting become more and more able and come from many more places than inside Syria. And then comes the Islamic State. And I would just ask Joe,, you know, is that how, you know,

I'm sure you saw it from such a different perspective than, you know, talking to folks who were in Foggy Bottom at the time, right? You were living this. And I wonder if that matches some of your lived experience, really there on the ground. I think that it, I certainly think that it does. You know, I think you've described it very, very well. And, you know, in my discussions with in my discussions with our folks that are on the

ground and my own experience here, you can't look at this through the lens of any given year. You have to look at it over a long period of time. And in fact, our eventual relationship with the Kurds in Syria really grew out of our relationship with the Kurds in Syria, really grew out of our relationship with the Kurds in Sulaymaniyah. And it was through that angle that we became aware of them, that we had a linkage to them, that we began to build trust and a relationship with them and gained an appreciation for this organization that was already in existence, and although they were under very intense pressure at that point by ISIS, had done a pretty good job of kind of preserving security in this area. I mean, I imagine there are certain complexities with committing to supporting Kurdish versus

Arab partner forces. Is that something that played into the U.S.'s decision-making calculus as it got involved? Yeah, you know, early on, I think we recognized the difficult position that partnering with the Kurds, Syrian Kurds, would put us vis-a-vis our NATO partner, Turkey. And at this time, we are very dependent upon Turkey because you know that there's facilitation going through Turkey to get into northern Syria. We are using bases in Turkey. We are countering on cooperation and collaboration with other Turkish, you know, law enforcement, intelligence organizations and the military to try to get our arms around this problem right here. And of course, you know, we have a longstanding, you know, NATO relationship with them. So we're

not anxious to put that relationship in jeopardy. And I think a lot of that contributed to our initial approach to look for Syrian Arab partners. Then, you know, we were again, we're looking for other partners on the ground is when we became aware of this element up in Kobani, largely at this time isolated up in Kobani through the Iraqi Kurds in Sulaymaniyah, who had a very good relationship with them. And we were able to become part of that relationship, start to communicate with them, and ultimately were able to, because of the dire situation in Kobani, make a strong case for why we needed to protect these people

and to help these people. And so through resupply that we put in there, through surveillance, through some fire support that we provided them, this became an option for us. And even after that, it wasn't immediate. There was a lengthy policy debate about whether this was the right partner force for us. And ultimately, we made the right decision in terms of that, that the Kurds could be a partner, not only the Kurds, but they had demonstrated to us that with other Syrian Arab militia groups in that area, that they could bring them on board, and that they would operate under this command and control structure that the Syrian Kurds had in place. So this became very apparent that this

was a good partner force for us at that point. And what's so interesting, if you talk to people who were on the Syrian Kurd side, they had gone to lots of international partners saying, look, we'll do the fighting. We need some resources. And everybody was trying to figure out what to make of him. This was a fighting force few people knew in a town few people had heard of that was leading a fight that few people wanted to lead on the ground. And I think from a human standpoint and from a wartime history standpoint of, you know, we talk about war as if it's not personal. And, you know, it quite deeply is for those who live it. And I see it from the

ground of those who were looking for international partners for support and saying, we will do the fighting. We are here on the ground already. How can we get you to pay attention to the fact that we're here risking our lives in this fight and need your support. Well, Gail, to that point, we spoke earlier about the Kurdish People's Protection Units, but I'd like to focus specifically on the Women's Protection Units, the YPJ, as a case to illustrate some of these dynamics that we've been talking about. And you've spent extensive time with this force, and your book, The Daughters of Kobani, offers an incredibly personal look at this. So how do we start to understand who the YPJ was and what they did that was so powerful? Sure.

I mean, the People's Protection Units were formed to create, you know, basically self-defense force for this area, basically to protect what became the political experiment of, in Northeastern Syria, of Kurdish self-rule, which had women right at its heart. And so part of what I wanted this book to do was to put you in the rooms and on the streets and in the neighborhoods to make you feel like you're there with a flashlight in this world. So you can't really understand the People's Protection Units unless you also understand the political effort that was tied to it. And so the People's Protection Units are formed. Women are part of it at the beginning.

It's usually in smaller numbers. And then by 2013, in April of 2013, women who already had been in fights, right, in clashes with Nusra and al-Qaeda-linked groups, as well as with other groups, have decided to create the Women's Protection Units. And I asked Rojda who is the American's interlocutor in Raqqa, deeply introverted person who would much rather be reading a book than be doing a CNN interview. And in fact, at the end of the Raqqa battle, CNN said, you know, what are you most looking forward to? And she said, not seeing you every

day. So, you know, somebody who had not set out to have this life. But I asked her early on in the book process, why did you want to start the Women's Protection Units? Because as far as I knew, especially early on, right, women already had the guarantees of full equality in ways actually that much of the rest of the world doesn't expressly stipulate. They already could lead men in battle. They already had a command structure where women were reporting to women. They already had the ability to fulfill any role. And I said, so why do that? She said, you know, one, you can't let stand a world in which ISIS is ISIS or any of these groups, right? In which women are seen as objects and

property. And then secondly, we just didn't want men taking credit for our work. And that was really the motivation. And I started laughing because you'd have to spend a lot of time and have the privilege of spending a lot of time in Northeastern Syria to understand how far away from so much of the rest of the world it feels. And yet here was this deeply universal sentiment

that there's nobody who identifies as VEVO doesn't understand. I think, as you see with many groups that are underrepresented, they felt very much like they had to be overprepared. And in fact, one of the things that stuck it out to me the most was early on, folks I had known from Ashley's War, the second book I wrote, had told me about the women's protection units. And they said, you know, they even crossed first in the nighttime crossing in Menbij, which was told to me was the first contested WETGAP crossing since Korea.

And they crossed first at nighttime, right? And because they had spent so much time preparing, preparing, preparing, and it felt like we have to get this right. We must go first because we're not just doing this for ourselves or for our people, but we're also obviously doing it for women. And you couldn't separate their sense of responsibility to women and the notion of women's emancipation and women's equality from the broader

fight against the Islamic State. Yeah, no, I just think this is such an interesting aspect. Looking at it from my perspective here, you know, we were certainly aware of the women's protection units and what they did. But, you know, from our perspective, we really looked at this much more as a whole. I recall my very first trip to Syria was in late April or early May of 2016, not long after I'd taken command at CENTCOM. And I had a meeting with General Mazloum. And that was, I think, the main event. But after that, he said, hey, would you like to come up to Kobani? And so we did. And we were linked up with a male officer, and he took us on kind of a battlefield tour, if you will. And he told the story of the YPJ fighters and what they

did in that very significant fight in Kobani and how they sacrificed themselves. And of course, when you're in Kobani at that time, you're seeing pictures of fighters that are being memorialized by the population. And there are a lot of females in there and right mixed in with the men. And of course, they've got a statue of this very prominent female fighter that played such a key role in the battle, sacrificing herself and taking a lot of ISIS with her. And so it was just an extraordinary experience. After I left that trip and I reported to the Secretary of Defense that we've got the right partners here in Syria and we will be successful with them. I think that stuck out to everybody. There's a

story in the book about Azim Asr, you know, in going into Kobani, one of the members of YPJ, her family, everybody thought Kobani was lost. And you have to remember at that time, ISIS had not had one battlefield loss, right? This was not, you know, and I remember talking to folks on the U.S. side who said, we just need to pierce their invulnerability. We need to pierce the sense that they're giving the world that they're Oz, you know, and that they're much bigger than they are, much greater than they are. And we were talking to Azima, I never thought, you know, and she was talking to her sister all the time, and everybody thought Kobani was lost. I mean, they were, you have to remember, they were down to city, to blocks in, you know, and she was talking to her sister all the time and everybody thought Kobani was lost. I mean, they were, you have to remember they were down to city blocks in,

you know, two to three, right? Like to the point that people would say, do you want to put out a statement that the town, that the town has fallen? And they said, absolutely not tomorrow morning, we're going to revisit, right? But, but we're not going to put that out tonight. And she would always tell her sister, no, when Kobani will not fall. And at that point, her whole family thought she was the only person in the world who felt that way. But the will, I think, was strong. And that's why there's a moment in the book where Naruz is the head of the Women's Protection Unit, is talking to them on the radio. And it's interesting, it's Chris Kalenda, who I know many of you know, wrote to me about it. I was talking about the leadership example on this. And I think you're low on ammunition, low on weapons, low on people.

You're being outfought. And she said to her field commanders, these men think you're worth nothing. And they think you are incapable of doing any of this. You have to show them what you are capable of so that even if this is your last moment, it will stand for something. And you couldn't separate that moment in Kobani from what had happened in Sinjar and what had happened to the entire Yazidi community. And so I think all of this is coming together as the Americans are looking for a partner on the ground. Joe, I'd like to start with you for this next question, since that hits on a key point about

picking a partner that has compatible motivations. As an all-female force, the YPJ had unique motivations for fighting ISIS. Do you recall any challenges to working with a partner that utilized female fighters, or did that affect how our advisors operated? Yeah, I think it's important to recognize that at this time, we had a very precise and small advisory capability on the ground. And it was part of our very exclusive special operations capability. So you had more mature operators and commanders on the ground who were dealing with this situation. And so, you know, while I'm sure there may have been some concerns about this, frankly,

it never really played out. And, you know, contextually, I would just add that in our own special operations community, we'd seen the value of cultural support teams. Gail talked about Ashley's, her book, Ashley's War, and Ashley White and what she and all her sisters did as part of our cultural support teams. And that was recognized as a positive force multiplier, frankly. And of course, we had just completed a discussion in the U.S. Special Operations Community, much less the broader military, about opening all combat positions to women. And one of the final things I did as a SOCOM commander before moving over to CENTCOM was actually make our recommendation to the Secretary of Defense that we in fact do that. So contextually,

we had really started crossing the Rubicon on this already and had arrived at the fact that, yes, women can contribute to this. And now we had an example of where it was happening on a daily basis and doing quite well. So, you know, as I kind of alluded to from my perspective, it was never a, you know, while we saw this as an advantage because there were a lot of, they were very capable fighters. We looked at the Syrian Kurds as a whole and it wasn't the fact that they had women fighters that really sold us on it. What it was is that they had a very capable command and control capability, and they had demonstrated capability in fighting ISIS. And they demonstrated the ability to bring Syrian Arabs

into their broader coalition and work with them and be accepted by them. This, to me, was the crowning moment here that recognized that this is the partner that's going to get us to where we want to go on this. And they had the distinct advantage of having this very unique female fighting corps that was part of it and just some great female leaders. You know, I have to tell you, in three years, I met with Mazloum almost every month to include a variety of video teleconferences and other things in between. And I never met with him without General Nauru's there, which was, to me, the strongest demonstration of his confidence in her and subsequently our confidence in them, frankly, as an organization. It was just an extraordinary, extraordinary relationship. So, Gail, what are the most significant policy

lessons we can draw from this experience? And I'd ask that both in terms of how the U.S. selects its partner forces and how and when it decides to intervene in the first place. In terms of the partner force, you cannot, I think there are two things that always stood out to me. One is the question of will, because it came up over and over again when talking with folks in Washington and people around the country who were involved with this, was that I think the motivation to know that these people would be having this fight, whether the Americans were there or not. I think the second thing was that there had been so much discussion about what then Vice

President Biden had talked about, about CT light and this whole notion of could you have U.S. air power, very slight footprint and a local force that would do the fighting. So here you had a situation where there was no large scale deployment of U.S. forces on the ground. no large scale deployment of US forces on the ground. What there was, was this fighting force on the ground that was going room by room and house by house and street by street against the Islamic State. And then backed certainly by very significant, but from the air, US power, right? US air power. And I think this was a learning that actually you had a situation where it did make the difference. And there were not large scale deployments of U.S. ground forces. It was people whose neighborhoods it was, whose towns it was, whose country it was, who were doing the fighting and very importantly for the world to remember the dying in the fight to stop the Islamic State. And I think those two pieces were both very important, the will and the fact that air power actually could make a significant difference with the ground force that was committed. Yeah, I would, just to pick up on that, I think Gail has hit it really, really well on some of the major policy approaches in thinking

about this. From my perspective, I think what really helped us here is that the Syrian Kurds, the YPG and the YPJ portions of it, had an existing command and control structure. They had operating methods. They had values. They had principles that went along with all of that. And we were able to fall in on that. And that is a good measure, I think, that we ought to be looking at as we look at partners in the future. We did not try, as we've done with other partners, try to recreate them in our own image. This was part of the problem with the Syrian militias, the Arab militias that we tried. We did try to change them a little bit, organize them a little bit differently, that it just was not going to work. But we took the courage as they were

in this, and we gave up a little bit of control for that. But what we got back exceeded any limitations greatly. And we kept them in the lead throughout all of this. And we trusted their decision-making in terms of this. And we certainly tried to influence that, and we made our positions known and everything with that. But ultimately, they owned the fights. And this, I think, was really, really an important aspect for us. You know, there were some deep frustrations as we kind of got down deep into the Euphrates Valley when, you know, some of the Arab component of the Syrian Democratic Forces were negotiating with ISIS and trying to get them out and trying to, you know, limit the destruction in their villages. That was a, you know, that was a hard thing to communicate to our policymakers near the end here that, hey, stand by.

Our partners are negotiating with ISIS. That didn't go well, but that was their way, frankly, and we had to accept that. And in the end, it worked. We got to where we needed to go. We limited collateral damage on the villages and things we were operating in, and we were able to eliminate the caliphate. So to me, this idea of looking for existing structures, taking them with us, and trying not to change the DNA of the organizations that we're dealing with was incredibly important. And the trust piece, I think, was so crucial.

The personal relationships, it's hard to overestimate and it's almost in some ways hard to transmit. And I hope the book does just a little bit. that were involved and a level of trust that was involved among folks who, you know, in other worlds might not have met, but in war and in the fight against the Islamic State were really brought together. And I think that the depth of trust was real and you could feel it. Gail, can you leave us with a final vignette of the women you profile in The Daughters of Kobani and touch on what motivated them to keep fighting? Look, it's a privilege to tell this story. It's a privilege to spend time with people whose lives have been shaped by this conflict every single day. And the thing that struck me, I'll share at

the end, was I had the opportunity and really the honor to spend a day with young women who all lived under the Islamic State from Raqqa, young Arab women who lived under the Islamic State. And the strength and the courage of those women who then joined the Women's Protection Units just always stayed with me. There was one young woman who had not left the house in three years and spoke in full paragraphs because she had just read Egyptian poets and just spoke beautifully to the point that my translator was just laughing. He's like, I can't even translate it. It's too, it's too beautiful. And I won't do it justice the way that she's speaking. And then there was a young woman whose brother joined the Islamic state.

And this goes to Joe's point about the negotiations, right. And the decisions to live with the ramifications of the Islamic state, right. Here's a young woman, brother joined ISIS, forced her to marry an ISIS fighter, really put her through a hell that even I, who've heard a lot, actually thought I might be ill listening to what she endured. And she's telling it with great calm. And it's actually seen at the end of the book. And the only sound is Rose does sunflower seeds hitting the metal bowl beneath her. And when I said, why did you come back and join the Women's Protection Units? Why would you do that? How would you have that courage? And she just looked at me and very quietly said,

why should a world in which men can do this stand? You know, thanks. That's a great story there. You know, I think the thing I would just close on is maybe a little bit of what Gail touched on here when she talked about trust, but take it in a little different direction, is that relationships really matter to us. And, you know, it was a relationship with Iraqi Kurds that brought us to the Syrian Kurds, frankly. I mean, we would not have been able to do that without that. And as we think about policies and we think about approaches to troubled areas like the Middle East, it is these types of relationships that give our leaders options and allow us to

work through very, very difficult periods. And, you know, I would just close with a little bit of a story of my own, that on relationships and the power of deep, thick relationships. You know, in December of 2018, as many of you will recall, we had an unfortunate political turn for us when our president made a decision to withdraw our forces from Syria at a time when the campaign is not yet complete, and we're kind of deep in the Euphrates Valley. And it kind of came as a surprise to everybody, especially to me. But one of my first phone calls after that or first videos after that is with General Mazloum because now this is public and now we have to talk about that. And we told him what we knew and what we didn't know and what we were going to do. But I was just so relieved by the way in which he took the information and the fact that the

investment that we had made in this relationship, it was very evident to me at that point. And I wasn't sure going into it by the end of the meeting I was, that the time we had invested in this relationship was going to help us get through this. It was going to help us get to the other side of this. It helped us to move towards the objective that our president had. And it was also going to allow us to do it in a way that we could work with our Kurdish partners on the ground, the SDF, and move forward. And to me, it was just highlighted to me that every investment that we've made in that relationship, we called on and we leveraged that afternoon right there. And in the days that followed and we were actually able to actually able to move forward.

And so to me, the big lesson out of this is the importance of relationship building. And I think that's a great place to wrap up the conversation. Joe Votel, Gail Tamaklamon, thank you so much for being here today. We really appreciate you coming on the Irregular Warfare podcast. Great to be with you. Thanks very much. Yes, thank you for having us. Thanks again for listening to episode 28 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks. In our next episode, Andy and Kyle will discuss influence operations with retired Lieutenant General Michael Nagata and Dr. Anthony Kordsman

from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Following this, Kyle will be joined by new team member Abigail Gage to discuss the future of special operations forces with Michelle Flournoy and retired Admiral Eric Olson, former commander of U.S. SOCOM. Please be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare podcast so you don't miss an episode. You can also follow and engage with us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. If you enjoyed this discussion, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. One last note. What you hear in this episode are the views and positions of the participants and do not represent those of West Point or any other agency of the U.S. government. Thanks again, and we will see you next time.